Page 29 of Up In Smoke

But last night, she’d whipped out her tattoos in a fit of anger. Feeling the fire as Luke had touched her, and doing …Oh my god, what had she done?

Life number two was bleeding into life number three. As much as she was attracted to him—clearly too much—she still wasn't completely convinced that he wasn't the arsonist. She didn’t believe he was, but her feelings had led her horrifically astray before and she couldn’t trust them.

The alarm began screaming at her and once again her hand flailed out to hit it. This time she forced herself out of bed and climbed into the shower, her body deliciously sore in previously unused places. She wasn't even sure if Luke had fled her home, or if she kicked him out. It seemed to be a mutual thing.

But he was gone now, and she could at least pretend that last night hadn’t happened, even if she couldn’t shake the memories that rushed back at her.

She got dressed, ate breakfast and drove to work. Ivy tried to turn her brain off as she checked into the library. This was not her usual MO. But she made it through the day as normally as possible, then picked up fast food on the way home. That wasn’t normal for third-life-Ivy-Dean either, but what was she going to do? The leftovers that she was intending to eat tonight hadn't existed after she'd fed them to Luke.

She brought her bag of cheap food home and sat at her bar … she couldn’t sit at the table. Between it having no chairs yet and being covered in sweaty steamy sexy memories, it wasn’t as though she could just unwrap her burger there and ignore the things she was trying hard to ignore.

So she sat on a barstool, played on her tablet, and tried to keep her brain from straying to the man she'd been magnetically attracted to for quite some time now.

In life number two, Ivy had known how to fuck someone and walk away. Was that what she was going to do here? Could she even do that?

It seemed that there would be no way that she could simply not see Luke Hernandez again. Even if she shifted her way out of his circle, they would surely run into each other. Maybe that would be okay. She could be polite. He could be polite.

But what if she uncovered that itwasone of his brothers starting these fires? Or even his father? What would she do then?

Her phone pinged and she saw the message from Jo. The shift must have hit a down patch.

—Holy shit, what did you do to Luke last night?

She froze. Had he gone into work and told everyone? That didn’t seem like Luke, but fucking a man she didn’t quite trust on her kitchen table didn’t seem like her either. Quickly, she tapped back a non-commital message.

—Why? What did he say?

Only as she hit send did she realize that she’d basically admitted everything.Fuck me.

No, honey. Luke already did that, she reminded herself.

—Oh, he’s just off his game big time. Alternately smiling at himself and then frowning at nothing. I figured it had to be about you.

Jo chased that message with a string of emojis that mocked her. But Ivy put her head in her hands and didn’t respond. Last time she’d incriminated herself.

She sighed and tried to think of other ways to catch or clear Luke’s brothers. Ivy wouldn’t admit to herself that solving that mystery would make room for her and Luke to be together. Theyweren’ttogether. But she worked on it anyway.

Tracking down Santiago Hernandez Senior had been difficult at best. The only thing she'd found so far was that the bastard had left his children when Carlos was barely out of diapers. Probably around the time the fifth son had been stillborn. Was there a connection? Did it matter?

There was no evidence she could find of any child support or even any contact after the day he left. She finished her burger with no more pings from Jo. Her thoughts scrambled as she celebrated having won yet another round of her matching game.

As the screen played an ad she wasn’t interested in watching, Ivy looked out the window. While she'd been eating, the day had gone from dark to pitch black. She'd left her new curtains wide open. They were cheap poly fabric, but the cranberry color had contrasted nicely with the pale, creamy sunshine of the walls. She loved the way the color popped and told herself that when she got chairs, she would get pillows that matched.

But as she looked out the large front window, her thoughts were not on matching pillows, but on the way her blood suddenly cooled as she scanned her own front yard and looked at the street. There was nothing she could put her finger on. Nothing she’d seen. But she couldn’t shake the sudden sensation that she was being watched.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ivy turned the key to the empty building. She liked being the only one here. Wednesdays meant they opened at noon and stayed open until nine at night. It was yet another change Ivy had brought to the tiny library.

The beauty of opening a library relatively from scratch was that she got to implement her own ideas. She wasn't changing set schedules that the townspeople already knew. She’d seen this at other libraries and loved the idea of late night book borrowing. So she tried it. The other good thing was that she didn’t have to work the late shift herself. Usually Shannon did. And Wednesday mornings were her chance to take care of things without anyone else around.

But today, as it had been since the fire, the library wasn't getting quite her full attention. She'd exhausted all the knowledge at her fingertips. But she was now one of the magicians she'd aspired to be and when she ran out of material, she turned to people.

For a moment, her heart clenched as she’d immediately thought about picking up the phone and calling Marina Balero. The detective had been a friend—helpful, smart, kind, and caring. Exactly the kind of officer you wanted in a small town.And she was gone. Murdered while solving a case, Marina had given her life to keep people safe.

Though Ivy knew many of the other officers, she wasn't sure who she could trust to give her the kind of information that she needed without turning it back around to the Hernandez family or maybe even Chief Taggart.

Was she making a mistake?Though she told herself she hadn't decidednotto tell the chief, she also hadn't told him and that was a decision, too. It had been several weeks since her own fire and she could tell Luke was getting antsy about the arsonist striking again. That in turn, made her antsy about it.

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